


footprints in the sand blow away

by Taraxac



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alienation, Friendship, Gen, Lonliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:28:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25640590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taraxac/pseuds/Taraxac
Summary: Nanaki and Vincent keep their yearly meeting
Relationships: Red XIII | Nanaki & Vincent Valentine
Comments: 12
Kudos: 12
Collections: FF7 Fanworks Exchange '20





	footprints in the sand blow away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TomteNisse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomteNisse/gifts).



It shouldn't be easy to sneak into a bar without much in the way of doors, locks, windows, or even walls to speak of. Perhaps that wasn't quite a fair way to put it: it didn't seem, to Nanaki at least, that the question of sneaking need even arise in such a place. He is not trying to be sneaky. There would be very little point. Especially given that he comes, as some of his human friends say, in peace.

So when the bartender turns around, sees him sitting there between the stools, yelps, and fumbles the glass he is holding, Nanaki has to wonder what exactly the owner was expecting when choosing his placement of establishment, and if there is some aspect of Midgar-Edgian-human etiquette he himself is missing.

"Hello," he offers, as the bartender who's name he never remembers steadies the glass, wipes it down again, and rests it on the counter with a sigh ( a gesture so like, and yet unlike, one whose name actually matters to him. Thin lines of sand on the counter, where her nails ought to drum a greeting.) “I am here to meet my friend. Has he arrived here? You would not miss him, he’s very tall.” 

The bartender, at least, does not seem as surprised to hear him speak as he had at his appearance. Maybe he remembers the year before last. Or...was it the year before the year before? Maybe the others of their had-been pack really do visit this establishment as cordially as they’ve said. Regardless. There are reasons after all that Vincent has picked here to meet, instead of Seventh Heaven, or somewhere even less familiar. At least, Nanaki assumes there are. 

A shrug and a wide sweep of arms for an answer.

“Look around buddy. Nobody here but you and me, and if you ask me that’s not gonna change much today.” The man points at the sky, where the sun is not. Not promising the wastelands rain just yet, but not inviting. A human would at least want a jacket. Lucky then, that neither Nanaki or his anticipated companion are quite human. “I’ll shout if someone else comes by, but I mean, you’ll probably see ‘em coming, right?”

“I appreciate that.” 

The bartender squints at him then. Puts his fists on his hips and leans forward and down, peering at Nanaki with an intensity that makes his tail twitch in self-conscious agitation. But it would be impolite to snap at him for it. He’s about to ask what this is about when-

“Coconut water!”

“Pardon me?”

“Coconut water.” The bartender straightens again, beaming proud. “That’s your drink. I remember last time. I didn’t wanna stick you with just water or leave you out. So I did some thinking and figured out, that was safe!”

“Oh...yes...that’s right actually.” Nanaki begins to wonder if he shouldn’t, in fact, remember the bartender's name. If the man can remember that about an encounter with him from some time ago, and they’re likely to see each other again…

Then again, it is a bartender's job to think about customers' drinks, is it not? And even the few days in which Nanaki has been, and will be, a part of this man's life are so vastly greater in proportion than his will be in Nanaki’s…

But he also remembers the cool-sweet of coconut water. Can’t help his whiskers twitching forward in interest. It may not be hot this time of year, but he has traveled long. “...Thank you. Do you have any today?”

He has not come here to be reminded of the different axis on which his life, and the majority of those he cares for, or even knows, will ever know, move. His years wearing like granite, theirs, limestone. 

“Betcha I do!” Grinning now, the bartender seemingly at ease as he finds the normalcy in the exchange, “You wait here, or you go find a table you like, and I’ll bring it your way in a minute.” 

“Thank you.” With that. Nanaki retreats. Glad to be free of the interaction, yes. Practically though, the bar is simply too high for him, and he isn’t exactly built for bar stools. 

He finds a table and chair set at the far right from the bar, and settles down to wait. He isn’t exactly built for chairs, either, but at least he can reach the top of a table, and it offers him a view of the bar, and the expanse of road stretching open and quiet between Edge and Kalm. It’s hardly busy, as he watches the bartender shuffle in a cooler behind the bar, retrieve a square box, shake it, and pour it out over ice, first into a tall glass and then hesitate, rush to the back, return with what looks to be a mixing bowl, and tip the contents of the glass into that instead. 

The road had been busy, he has been told, in the days before he was first brought to ShinRa’s labs. It had quieted again in the wake of Meteor, as fuel supplies had stuttered. It had roared with travelers the last time he had seen Cloud and Tifa in their home, with the widespread use of gasoline. 

When last he had wandered through his hometown, the talk there had been familiar. Edged with the same worry and rush that had in his youngest life been reserved for the reactors, only this time the words that carried those had been ‘carbon emissions’ and ‘non-renewable’ and ‘air pollution’.

He wonders in a distant way, if this is why the road lays so quietly.  
The bartender seems momentarily befuddled again, when he approaches the table, bowl in hand, as to where to put it. Nanaki can read the conflict in his open face as he hesitates, starting first to the table, then the floor, and ultimately settling on setting the bowl on the chair. It’s clear he wants to be neither presumptive nor demeaning. Nanaki can hardly fault him for his uncertainty. Though the inevitability of it does help to keep him out of human company that isn’t the canyon, or his comrades home. 

“Cheers! Need anything else, you know where to find me.” Nanaki lets him go with a nod. Settles down to lap at the water and it’s gentle sweetness with a gratitude that surprises him, and to watch the road. 

Nanaki has only seen these things in passing, in glances as he makes his way to different corners of the world. Has only thought of them as a day to avoid the road, or day to make use of the stretch of flat open terrain. They are not the things he is looking to see. 

But when he does stop, they are what he hears talked about for days, weeks, months. 

His oath is to see and remember all the world that his grandfather could not. And in its way, that most of those dear to him will not. But when he’d sworn it he had been thinking of the growth of trees planted by the re-constructionists hands and the heights to which they would grow. Of change in where he can and cannot see the stars as the cities grow and ebb. 

Of the steady flow of fish back into the rivers and streams, and the coolness of the water in his fur and the satisfying sink of his teeth into food now untainted with mako runoff and thin soul. 

He finds himself wondering, as he waits, and not for the first time, for whom he is really documenting. 

He finds himself wondering also about the wisdom of their hosts choice of venue again, when another yelp, and a crash this time, announce the arrival of a second customer. 

Vincent, he thinks, does it on purpose. 

Nanaki himself had neither seen nor heard his approach, so the bartender can hardly be faulted for being taken by surprise this time. 

Rather than turning to watch him come, Nanaki hurries to finish his drink. He doesn’t want to give the appearance of distraction once his companion joins him fully. Not when they spend only a few hours in each other's company a year. 

Not when the ritual of passing what he has seen onto Vincent is the only record that will someday exist of any of them. Of himself. 

He doesn’t have to wait long. He’s only halfway through his bowl when the telltale shift in the air that signals Vincent's approach touches his nose, his ears. Turning it cool, and restless on a level lower and smaller than what he can consciously describe. The beast in Nanaki finds some threat in it still.

The friend in him quells it. And he looks up, ears forward and tail swishing in greeting. 

Vincent sets a bottle on the table, and it connects with the wood there in a sound that cuts off a little too dull and a little too quick. Through some heavy fog that Nanaki cannot see. 

Vincent does not sit down, not yet, but he does nod and murmur an apology for having kept Nanaki waiting. 

Nanaki shakes his head. He hasn’t been bothered. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

“Always.” A pause then, Nanaki thrown by the uncharacteristic welcome of the statement. “Who else will tell you that your stories are pointless?” More familiar. But as familiar, and as it has been the last many years, Vincent says it with a hint of a smile, behind his jacket collar. “What do you want to tell me this year?” 

Nanaki laughs with his tongue, and takes in the familiar sight of Vincent’s red and black against a wasteland sky (and the strange one, of his footprints in the sand, of the knowledge of someone else there with them, one car finally passing on the road, the radio playing as the bartender sings along, half-softly. No shadows loom over them. No burnt out hulls of buildings, ever more and more devoured by untended vines. No remnants of strangers’ lives beneath their feet.)

“You’re right. What do you care of the new market in Corel?” Vincent un-stoppers the bottle, fills a long stemmed glass with red dark liquid, and sits, and though he only glances at him, Nanaki knows he’s listening. Just as promised. “A strange nest in the mountains of Nibel? What I found in a cave off the coast of Mideel? What Yuffie said to me on new years?” He watches, with each question, the subtle change in expression that will guide him. They will get through every story that Nanaki wants to tell, eventually. They always do. 

But he likes to at least lead with something that Vincent will be a little more curious about than others. 

The mountain, then.

And so, settling on it, Nanaki starts to tell his story, as they had once agreed, and Vincent pretends not to be interested, as they had once agreed. 

_Too bright a day to navigate by sight well - the glare off rock and snow blurring everything but what lay immediately under paw and snout, immediately in front of him. And that's what's drawn him there, this time. Had he been focused on what he could see, he would not have caught the strange scent._

_An animal, surely, but no animal he knows of._

_And if it is wild and new to him, then it may well be new in this world. If it is new, he must experience it. Must record it._

_Experience it he does, after half a days stumbling, tear-eyed trek upwards from the reactor. Picking his near-blinded way along the mountain-face, and following the whims of the wind._

_The nest is under paw before he knows it, and almost before he is able to stop himself from putting down his weight. And his scramble to stop himself, to find some other footing, almost sends him scrabbling down the mountain face._

_When he catches his footing and catches his breath, the sight that greets him is just as strange as the smell had been. A half unburied nest, with seven eggs. Too round to be birds eggs, and shells with a hue that seems to flicker, as he moves his head from side to side, from no colors to all._

_Besides, they've no smell of birds. If anything, the blood he smells in them is warm._

_No. It could not have belonged to the bird he had eaten yesterday. The eggs, much too small. But warm still, a gentle flutter in them, against his nose. Either to hatch soon, or to perish, and curious, he wants to know._

_The compromise he makes with himself is to re-bury it, gently. What leaves and grass he can find over what soil he can recover. And to wait._

_A night and a day, he tells himself. He needs the rest as it is, and after all, he has plenty of food._

_He ends up waiting three. And he ends up chasing off two crows and one kyuvilduns while he does._

_On the third day he wakes early, in the half light, to the sensation of crawling and the sound of tiny cries. And when he looks, all the eggs are broken open. At first, it does not make any sense, for he can see no hatchlings, and he can make no sense of the tracks around the nest. The leaves are so far flung and the soil so cut up in a mix of prints that look mammal, and patterns that look...long bodied, and thin._

_And if something has gotten to the nest in his sleep, why can he hear-?_

_It is then he feels something on his paw. and it feels like tiny paws._

_When he looks down, it is._

_It is tiny paws. It is tiny paws attached to the front half of what is very clearly a grey kitten, though it's eyes, brilliant green, should not be open yet._

_And the back half of it absolutely should not be a tiny snake._

_And that time, he really does skid back down the mountainside, in his alarm._

_But he has seen something new.  
_

The end of the story finds Vincent laughing silently into his collar, and promising that come spring again, he’ll venture up that way too. Just to make sure that Nanaki has not invented the creatures in his young imagination. 

His presence though, remains heavier than it should, at least after the first story. At least after a story Nanaki knows that Vincent has enjoyed. 

So he does not begin to tell another. Waits instead, and watches the featureless clouds roll above them, while Vincent watches something in the distance that he cannot pinpoint.

“You should visit Tifa, if you can. She’s losing someone. Sooner than she thinks.”

“What? Who? How do you know?”

“I know.” In a voice that comes from Vincent, but is not quite his own. The humming in the air around him grows in frenzy, pushing outward.

For a freezing moment, Nanaki catches a flash in Vincent's eyes, of something far older and far more enduring than himself, and looks away. 

When Vincent speaks again, it is gone, and Nanaki is once again in precious company. 

“Is that why you didn’t want to meet in the ruins this year?”

“One reason.” 

“I see. Well, of course I will go! Is there anyone else I should gather? Are you going to see her too?”

“...” In the months that they had once traveled and fought together, and the years they had kept these meetings, Nanaki has seen Vincent uncomfortable enough times to recognize it. But not enough times to recognize it promptly. “It will be easier for me, if I know you will be there too. I am not,” And he understands better now, all at once, why they are meeting here this year, on the edges of civilization, rather than in the graveyard of it. “ I am too comfortable with loneliness. It’s one thing for me to explain it to you. It is something else to try to face down it’s wreckage in another.”

They have long since agreed. They are unusual companions in time and isolation. And seek as they may to fill it, they are unusually ill-equipped to battle it for others.

That doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to try. 

Vincent’s second glass is nearing empty, and the sky is darkening, now. For only the second time since they had settled, a pair of lights appear on the road before them, headed this time away from the city. The sound it makes is unhealthy and strained, and in its wake, wisps of oily smoke, slow to dissipate. A darklight on their path from here. 

“Thank you, Nanaki.”

“Always, my friend.”


End file.
